Settler colonialism isn’t simply domination. It’s sustained through a politics of recognition that accommodates Indigenous legal claims to naturalize colonial hierarchies.

In writing this book I set out to problematize the increasingly commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state can be reconciled via a liberal “politics of recognition.” I characterized the “politics of recognition” as a recognition-based approach to reconciling Indigenous peoples’ assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity-related claims through the negotiation of settlements over issues such as land, economic development, and self-government. I argued that this orientation to the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority.

My conceptualization of settler-colonialism as a structure of domination predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and political authority drew significantly from two theoretical resources: Karl Marx’s writings on the “primitive accumulation” of capital and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial critique of Hegel’s master/slave parable when applied to colonial situations. With respect to Marx, I argued that three issues must be addressed within his work to make his writings on colonialism relevant for analyzing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and liberal settler polities like Canada. First, I argued that Marx’s thesis on primitive accumulation must be stripped of its rigidly temporal character; that is, rather than positing primitive accumulation as some historically situated, inaugural set of events that set the stage for the development of the capitalist mode of production through colonial expansion, we should see it as an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present. Settler- colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity. Second, I argued that Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation must be stripped of its early normative developmentalist character. While it is correct to view primitive accumulation as the condition of possibility for the development and ongoing reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, it is incorrect to view it as a necessary condition for developing the forms of critical consciousness and associated modes of life that ought to inform the construction of alternatives to capitalism in settler- colonial contexts. I also suggested that Marx himself came to acknowledge the problematic character of this early formulation of his thesis and worked to correct it in the last decade of his life. And finally, I argued that the forms of colonial power associated with primitive accumulation need not be understood as strictly coercive, repressive, or explicitly violent in nature; rather, the practices of dispossession central to the maintenance of settler-colonialism in liberal democratic contexts like Canada rely as much on the productive character of colonial power as it does on the coercive authority of the settler state. Seen from this angle, settler-colonialism should not be seen as deriving its reproductive force solely from its strictly repressive or violent features, but rather from its ability to produce forms of life that make settler-colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seem natural.

To tease out the productive character of settler-colonial power I turned to the theoretical contribution of Frantz Fanon. I used Fanon’s work because it implicates the role played by recognition in the reproduction of settler-colonial forms of rule in a manner that still resonates today. More specifically, I used Fanon’s critical engagement with the dialectic of recognition theorized in Hegel’s master/slave narrative to identify the neocolonial function played by contemporary recognition politics in maintaining the settler-colonial relationship between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state. I drew three in- sights from Fanon in particular. First, I claimed that Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s theory of recognition convincingly unpacks the ways in which delegated exchanges of political recognition from the colonizer to the colonized usually ends up being structurally determined by and in the interests of the colonizer. Second, Fanon also identifies the subtle ways in which colonized populations often come to develop what he called “psycho-affective” attachments to these circumscribed, master-sanctioned forms of delegated recognition. For Fanon, these psycho-affective or ideological attachments create an impression of “naturalness” to the colonial condition, which he referred to as “internalization” or “internalized” colonialism. Third, Fanon showed how colonized populations, despite the totalizing power of colonialism, are often able to turn these internalized forms of colonial recognition into expressions of Indigenous self-empowerment through the reclamation and revitalization of pre- colonial social relations and cultural traditions. In the end, however, Fanon viewed these practices of Indigenous cultural self-empowerment, or self- recognition, as insufficient for decolonization: they constitute a “means” but not an “end.”